echoed thoughts

I have been quiet for a while; but of course in the meantime the world has been busy. I have been busy too but I decided to keep quiet and think for a while about what my next piece would be.  I think it is ill disciplined to leave a thought process unfinished and I felt I had accumulated quite a lot of unfinished thinking.  Amongst the many threads to pull there were some identity management issues about which I had been asked to write.  I had been challenged that it was all very well to lead from the centre, but to where do I lead? And I had also been challenged about why I was so critical of those who demonstrated “systems” or “global” thinking.

If you write, you certainly get held to account, which is why I started to do it.  But an observation I have is that what readers are really asking you to do with their questions is to provide your definitive view of your world; something that they often cannot or will not do themselves.  It seems to me that the prevailing view is that the writer is supposed to be accountable while the reader is allowed to keep their options open.  Is to write to be cast in stone, while to listen is to be free?  If that were to be the case, then the writers would surely stay silent and the reader would have nothing to do.

We hold the writer to a very high standard, and hold the reader to none.  Maybe it was ever so; but there is no point whining about it. I still have the problem of finishing my thinking and answering my readers questions. I guess I have to provide my definitive view of the world.

Of course you will be completely unsurprised to find that I do not believe that there is a definitive answer as to how you should view the world.  If it were true that there was such a thing then your choice would be be to narrow your selection down to one of the scriptures written by one of the previously enlightened prophets, choose the one you believe to be the definitive answer, and then go off and fight for it.  Unless of course you chose the Buddhist scripture.  In that case you would sit there in abject confusion trying to work out how to fight to prove that your choice was the right one, while also respecting that your choice precluded the choice to fight.  But maybe Buddhism is the truth – fighting for a definitive truth is nonsense?

My head hurts.

But I do believe in one truth; and that is that we should fight to be free.  The issue I see with those who want to track my identity, those who want to assert that there is a true way that we should all follow, or those who think that they can cogitate about the narrow problem in front of them and divine a global solution, is that they all propose that once their work is done, we should submit to their decisions and be subject to their value judgements.  Why else would you track someone other than to catch them when they move outside a boundary?  Why else would you argue against the center unless you wanted to move people to another place?  How else can you propose a solution unless you think that there is a problem that needs to be solved?

How can you propose any of these things without challenging someone’s freedom?  Could it be that by being liberal with our our view of how the world should work, and trying to implement them, that we in fact are walking over other people’s liberties?

And so if I have to choose a definitive view of life it is that all things should be viewed through the lens of respecting freedom.  Of course I don’t mean freedom without limit.  Rent seekers who wish to exploit the riches of the nation should be stopped; bankers and monopolists take note. And freedom of one individual stops when the space of another individual starts.  But these are largely self evident and where they are not we have an effective adversarial legal system.

What I am talking about is that we should be free from the oppression that can be caused when the opinions or ideologies or agendas of others can be enforced on another.   It’s easy to find.

Consider the many Government agencies who are creating infrastructure to monitor and control so that we can be safe.  “Give us your freedom and we will keep you safe” they say; but in return for the sure surrender of our freedom they cannot return the sure promise of safety.  The man who surrenders his freedom for safety deserves neither freedom nor safety, said Benjamin Franklin.

Consider pan global enterprises such as Facebook and Google who are capturing and purloining our personal information so that our lives can be easier.  “Give us your freedom and we will make your life easier” they say; but in return for the surrender of our freedom they cannot promise that they won’t make our life unbearably harder due to the unintended consequences, and the yet to be known consequences, of the brokering, mining, eternal storage, and theft due to ineptitude, of our personal information.

And consider the people we know and work with who are becoming extremely adept at finding our information and using it against us.  We all see it in the workplace all the time; employers now look at your tweets, posts and other social media information and use it in their decision making.  The HR department monitoring our social lives – because they can.  “Subvert yourself and stay customer friendly 24×7 and you will have a great career” they say; but in return for blandness and conservatism the faceless drones will appear and retrench you at the first sniff of a bonus threatening profit reduction.

Stop and think about what we are giving up.  I have.

Respect your freedom; no one else will.  My central philosophy is to always move towards freedom.

I started my career as an experimental Psychologist working as a research assistant in a laboratory where we studied how animals learnt in a very controlled learning environment (think Pavlov’s dogs and Skinner Boxes), and we then applied this data to theoretical learning models which could be modeled in computer simulations.  I would develop the simulations and run them on the computer, then we would run the experiments with the animals and compare the data.  In other parts of the lab we actually looked at how the brain pathways changed between experimental groups and control groups.

Nearly 25 years later and I am still reading articles where the predominant metaphor for the brain is that it is like a computer, and the computer is like a brain.  I am definitely out of touch with the detail of the research today, but even then we knew that a binary model of computing was too simplistic to explain the brain.  The central nervous system certainly has aspects that can be described as being like a digital computer, but it also sits inside a body that functions with a very analogue endocrine system.  And given what we are learning about quantum physics and how cellular systems function like nano machines rather than as little test tubes for chemical reactions, I believe I can safely conclude that we will not see an algorithm running on a Von Neumann architecture (ie. today’s computers) that comes anywhere near imitating the human brain.  Systems may demonstrate intelligent behaviours, but they are not any closer to being analogues of human intelligence.  And that is because the metaphor does not work beyond the simple explanation.

I moved from research to finance in an almost stereotypical fashion – a headhunter working for a US bank convinced me that double pay (not hard to do when you work as a researcher on a government grant) and a new car was a good enough reason to retire the lab coat and work on “intelligent” trading systems.  The project I worked on was a failure because it was too fussy and took too long and trading businesses are not famous for their patience with either time or detail.  Banks may want intelligent systems, but they don’t always have intelligent management.  Thankfully I was recruited over into the funds management business of the firm where they had some very big and hard technical problems and a motivation to be patient.  It was there I learnt all about enterprise computing and then ultimately ended up in executive roles before deciding I wanted to do some detailed work again.  The only person who would pay me to do that was me, so I exited corporate life to become an entrepreneur.

As a rule I do not normally appeal to the authority of my experience, however I believe that I can assert that I have seen many, many metaphors over my career.  Science metaphors (it’s like a computer), system metaphors (it’s like a brain), business metaphors (it’s like a person), social metaphors (it’s like a family), political metaphors (it’s like a tribe); to name a few.  The human need to explain things results in many metaphors because metaphors are useful in this regard.

Of course the technology industry abounds in metaphors, and that is because computers are complicated.  At its very fundamental level, a computer system is simple enough – it is just a general purpose digital machine that takes inputs, performs a calculation, and produces outputs. All inputs are machine generated (Eg a button click or a network device), and all outputs are machine interpreted (Eg. a display monitor or a sound device). The only way a human can interact with a computer is when there is a conversion of a human output to a machine input, and the conversion of a machine output to a human input. So computer human interaction at its most basic is a human manipulating a device to create inputs to a machine, and a human interpreting the outputs from a device attached to a machine.

But while computers at the fundamental level are easy enough to describe in simple terms such as machines and physical interactions, when they are large, fast, and part of an integrated network of machines; they rapidly become very complex to the point where knowing how the fundamentals work is not a meaningful way to describe the layers of complexity.

So to make it easier to understand systems so that we can explain computer systems to ourselves and others, we create and evolve metaphors that allow us to share concepts with each other by describing a new idea in terms of another.  The classic example is the “Window” which explains the new idea of a region on a screen with some content in it. It’s not a window – it’s a region on a plate of glass that has colored dots turned on or off based on the bits in the machines memory allocated to describe the location and color of the dots on the glass. But to call it a window works as a metaphor and so we use it. Likewise a window that contains a drawing program is not a canvas – technically it’s the same as a window (which is not really a window). And the tools you use are not paint brushes; they are just bits created from a device called a mouse (which is not a mouse but looks like one as it has a tail) that transform the memory that is represented on the window. It looks like we are painting, we call it painting, but it is a metaphor of painting that we use to describe some processes occurring in a computer.

The use of the metaphor also continues into computer devices that don’t have a screen attached; we call these devices “servers” because they serve the “client” computer that does have a screen and a person in front of it. Today servers are often not even physical devices; they are virtual devices running as a “tenant inside a container”; software that is actually running on the real machine that is pretending to be a virtual machine. And in this connected world, these virtual devices are often housed in a place metaphorically called “the cloud”.

Metaphors are also used to describe how humans interact with machines. Human users talk about our online “identity” and talk about security and verification as if we are passing through passport control at a border. We can have an online “personality” and play games represented by our “avatars”.

And metaphors are also at work in the programming world. We have business objects which are also interchangeably called components. Objects and components are metaphors created by programmers because we had to divide and conquer the complexity of analyzing, programming and managing large systems that implement business processes. We also talk about “sockets” and “ports” and we “call remote procedures” which technically are the same as “messages” and “publications” as they are all metaphors to describe how we send and or receive bits between two machines.

And human users that create systems use the metaphor of the “architect” as someone who designs and builds computer systems like someone who designs and builds real houses. Architects become the creators and defenders of metaphors as if their metaphors are real things bound by the laws of nature and physics.  Computer “architects” expect their models of the world to be adhered to by other software builders just as real architects and builders are actually bound and constrained by the real laws of what is physically possible when you design a real building. In the real world, foundations are at the bottom of the house and the roof at the top. In the computer world a server can be physical or virtual, a server can run another server, an object can be a component, a component can be made of objects, a service can be a function, and a function can be a service. There are no laws of computer science architectures; only agreements to agree amongst a community of like minded individuals, or compliance requirements within an organisation.

And so while we have developed standard patterns and “architectures” in technology, many of our technology metaphors are running out of usefulness. The windows and client/server narrative breaks down in the smartphone and tablet world. Even though they have a screen with windows and can also run services such as web servers that can be connected to by other client devices – we are suddenly literal and call these “mobile devices” that have “touch screens”.

Metaphors are also getting overused to the point where they become recursive and confusing. Today you can have a real machine running a virtual machine which is hosting several Java virtual machines which are running application servers which have separate containers which run components which are providing services – which if you wanted to you could program directly to run on a single standalone machine. And increasingly the standalone machine is also a device performing server functions, rather than being a traditional server.

Our definitions are also resulting in highlighting miniscule differences that obscure the function of a device. We describe central processing units (CPUs) as being different to graphics processing units (GPUs) when they are both processing units that are specialized by function. So we can have a clusters of CPUs communicating over networks to do faster math when you can also use GPUs which are clusters of small specialized CPUs that communicate over an internal bus. These days we also have clusters of CPUs connected to GPUs where you have network and bus communications working in very large clusters – over the cloud. These functional definitions make us forget that GPUs are math engines, CPUs are math engines, and clusters are math engines and when we want a math engine, we have more than one solution available to us.

If you take the view that we talk about our systems using metaphors, and that our metaphors and our relationship to them (our roles) have been defined incrementally over time, then how we create, manage and use systems is the sum of history and happenstance rather being designed in the moment for the problems at hand. So while there is benefit in us all having a shared view of systems and can coalesce our thinking about how systems are created and deployed, there is an open question as to whether our metaphors are optimal and can adapt quickly enough to new problems requiring new solutions.

Take for example virtual machines.  Virtual machines are metaphors – they are not real machines.  They are just software applications.  But by continuing to use the machine metaphor, IT departments continue to manage the virtual machine as if it is a real machine.  And so while the marginal cost of “manufacturing” a new machine becomes near zero, the deployment and administration costs stay the same as if the software machine is a real machine.  When stories like this happen, it’s time for a new metaphor!

But the need for new metaphors goes even deeper than existing problems.  As our devices become more capable and they become more integrated into our lives we are starting to talk about our digital devices in more anthropomorphic terms such as “agents”, “helpers”, or “indispensable partners”.  We are creating emotional attachments to our devices and the concept of “device” is becoming too narrow to explain what our devices mean to us.

So my question is – can we do more with our technology with new technology metaphors? The mirror image of this question is are we inefficient in our use of technology because we are trapped in our metaphors?  This is an open question and I think that there is a lot of potential innovation to be found by questioning metaphors and pursuing new ones.  Here are some ideas. If you are in banking – what if you actually use the “Teller” metaphor to the extreme for your online service?  It’s not “like” a teller; it is a teller.  Where does that take you?  Or if you are in designing control systems – what if you use the “pilot” metaphor to its extreme? It’s not like an autopilot – it is a pilot.  Where does that take you?  Or if you are creating an analytics system, what if you say that it’s not for a quant, it is a quant?  Where can that take you?

One of the most interesting metaphors I have been following lately has been the genetic metaphor for systems creation and deployment.  My challenge has been to stop thinking about my systems as being “like” an organism; I have been thinking about my systems as being real organisms.  Unlike the brain as computer metaphor that has reached it’s limits, I have found that the DNA and genetics metaphor has provided very rich grounds for my work as I try to “evolve” and “grow” large scale, distributed systems that are resilient and self regulating.

The irony is that I was also talking to a compatriot in the nano biology sphere, and he was saying how the greatest innovations in his field has not been from thinking more about the inner workings of cells as being about physics and chemistry, but rather as thinking about them as nano machines.  There have been significant innovations from this line of thought as proteins are “folded” and ribsomes are created that manufacture proteins using nano scale, atomic engines.  As we talked it dawned upon both of us that by explaining machines as biology, and biology as machines, we were both moving closed to the goal of having machines integrated in to biology and biology integrated with machines.  Neither of us see us reaching the “singularity”, but by changing our metaphors we are moving ourselves forward.

If you are using metaphors, and you are, think about changing them.  It will feel uncomfortable and it will take some effort to take others with you, but the evidence is emerging that it will be worth the effort to break free and create new metaphors for a new world.

God it’s hard to be an optimist these days; and my last blog on global warming has opened up quite a few conversations that prove just how hard it is.

When I was in junior high school I was made to sit through the movie “The Day After” which you may recall was about the day after a nuclear war.  Now I lived in a country town of about, oh maybe 5,000 people in the “greater metropolitan area”, in rural Australia where the biggest issue was the consolidation of dairy farm milk quotas.  We were a safe distance from a nuclear blast in Sydney let alone Washington DC.  Sydney as you know is about as far as you can get from DC without starting to head back.  Sure, we had some US Echelon stations in Western Australia, but they were further away from my home town than Auckland in New Zealand.

But I thought the world was going to end and had scoped out how I was going to create a nuclear fall out shelter and lost sleep wondering how I was going to survive the global nuclear winter.

My young son was being taught about the “horrors” of global warming at school and it unsettled him.  At least I could build a fall out shelter against the wall in the middle of the room of the house and hoard water.  But if I say to him the world is stuffed, then the world for him is stuffed and there is nothing he can do except get scared.

Of course he has a bright future.   Let’s not steal it from him.

I won’t give up on the democratic process. And I believe that looking back from my short perspective on nuclear holocausts that did not arrive, unbreathable air in California that is now breathable, wind farms in the Ohio valley, cow manure electricity farms in Vermont, solar panels on Australian houses, and those damn college girls that almost run me down in their Prius cars as they text and drive in Boston, that the world will get better.

There is a song in Australia that was written in the 80s as a protest against the US presence in Australia that made us a nuclear target.  It said that “It’s better to die on your feet than to live on your knees”.

I will die on my feet as an optimist.  I will not live on my knees as a pessimist.

I encourage everyone else to do the same.

As Winston Churchill said; I choose to be an optimist as I do not like much the alternative.

Choose optimism; I exhort you.

Tonight I am holed up in Boston sorting my socks because blizzard “Nemo” has shut the pubs and blocked my door. I was supposed to be on a plane to Australia right now, but I seem to have a broken long range forecast mechanism because I keep missing departures from summer hurricanes and winter blizzards.

While on the subject of socks, I think that some serious scientific work could be done studying the migratory patterns of socks.  I reckon the secret service could stand over my washing machine and drier and the little buggers would still escape and hide from me.  If you ever meet a pair of socks that are happy to stay together – let me know.  Mine sure hate each other and would prefer to have one of a pair in Sydney and the other in Boston.  Except for the pair with holes in them that I swear I have thrown out at least a dozen times.  I’ll probably get buried in that pair.

You know you can do serious scientific work with socks – because you can create an experiment and repeat it.  Hence you can quite legitimately become a sock scientist.  It won’t pay much, and your career may be short, but you can if you really want to apply science to socks.

But you can’t with global warming.  You see the problem with global warming is that it cannot be studied with the scientific method.  If you are a Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy fan, you may recall that according to The Guide the world was actually designed and constructed at a special factory.  If that were true you could actually study global warming with the scientific method by constructing a whole set of different worlds and insert different levels of various gasses in to the atmosphere and see what happened.  But The Guide is not real and we only have one world and hence cannot perform a set of repeatable experiments on it.  So what we are stuck with are observations over time and inferences made from a very limited set of data.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not a “denier” any more than I am Al Gore.  But I am sick of the constant narrative that any “extreme” weather is proof of global warming.  I watched an interview with a guy from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology about the recent hot weather in Australia and he quite rightly made the point that we can point to higher temperatures, but we cannot infer the cause.  He also made the point that we are also getting better at collecting data and our instruments are more accurate and so that we may also be getting better at measuring extremes and that with our limited data sets we may not have yet seen all the extremes.  He sure annoyed the anchor who was trying to get him to say that what we are seeing is global warming.

But the main reason why I am sick of global warming is how it has become yet another inane religious debate.  Global warming has become a divider of people and the debate leaves very little room for people to sit in the middle ground.  Do you want a perfect world of nature or do you want to corrupt it and make it in to a toxic sewer?  Do you want to save the world or do you want to destroy it?  Are you an evil denier or an enlightened champion?  Are you poor working class in a dirty job or a banker in a nice suit working in corporate green wash?  Are you uneducated or are you smart?  Are you young and learning climate change at school and part of the solution, or old and crusty and cynical and part of the problem?

On the one hand you have these people, and on the other hand you have the other people.  But hang on a minute; since when did we only ever have two hands?  Australia does not have 2 hands, it has 25 million people with 2 hands.  America does not have 2 hands, it has 300 million people with two hands.  Now that’s a lot of hands.  Sure some are at one end and some at the other, but there are a hell of a lot more hands in the middle.

So I have decided that I do not believe in climate change, and I also do not deny climate change.  I believe that we should re frame the discussion.

How’s this for a start.  Pollution is undesirable; let’s stop it.  Jobs are precious; let’s not kill them with uncompetitive taxes.  Technology advances create jobs; let’s invest in it.  Waste is indulgent and strains resources; let’s reduce it.

Let’s stop listening to people with only two hands and put all our hands to work on solutions.

I recently watched “Religulous” by Bill Maher and if you have not seen it, I commend it to you. If you are an atheist you will definitely love it, and if you are religious you will definitely hate it.  To me, regardless of the viewers perspective, I think it’s clever and thought provoking to be able to make a movie that can raise passions regardless of the viewers perspective.

When I watched it, I also watched it with some of my children who are now young adults and have their own heads on their shoulders.  But as Marg, my wife, quite rightly and intelligently pointed out to me; there is no point in showing a movie or running an argument that gets people all worked up with no where to go.  All you are doing is doing what the movie says religion does – fire people up over nonsense arguments over nonsense topics.  So I promised her that I would think about it.

The problem that I see with anti-religious advocates such Bill Maher in “Religulous”, or Richard Dawkins, the famous scientist and author of books such as “The God Delusion”, is not that they are incorrect; I personally subscribe to their arguments.   The problem I see with their approach is that they belittle, deride, eviscerate, and decimate their opponents with logic and science without understanding that the people who they belittle, deride, eviscerate and decimate are not the least bit interested in logic and science.

I grew up in conservative christian churches where hell was talked of as being a real place, the rapture was talked about as being a real event (originally proposed to occur in 1988 40 years after Israel became a nation in 1948, but since swept under the carpet as a “whoopsie” and moved to a future date) , creation happened in 6 days, and evolution was firstly frowned upon as being plain wrong, and then as the evidence of evolution became main stream and irrefutable, slowly appropriated in to the narrative of “guided evolution”.

But let me tell you, while the nonsense that Dawkins and Maher rail against was, and still is, being preached from pulpits, most of the listeners let it wash over them.  The reason why they were at church was not because they wanted to hear a revised or updated version of extreme fundamentalist nonsense; they were there because they were part of a community, or because it was part of their history or culture or family, or because for one reason or another it was a part of their life.  Some people were there just because they liked to sing in choirs; others saw it as a form of meditation.  And some others were there because they were lonely and would have killed themselves without company and some sense of hope.

So while both Maher and Dawkins are both completely logical, secular, and clever; to me they get caught in exactly the same trap that they are trying to spring.  They are pointing out extremism by being extremists; they go to the extremes and leave no center.  That’s what religious fundamentalists do – they say you are either saved or lost, going to heaven or hell, believers or non believers, evolutionists or creationists, with us or against us.  But the reality is that for historical, cultural, or even political reasons, the religious also occupy the social space; the space of community, culture and family.  So to many people when you belittle, deride, eviscerate, and decimate their religion, you also belittle, deride, eviscerate, and decimate their family, culture and community.   That is no way to win an argument.

To me, I think that the atheists and the secularists have the challenge, not the religious.  Rightly or wrongly, and who cares, religion occupies its space.  Religion, if it is to be replaced, has to be replaced by something that is based on logic and science, and also provides the non religious benefits of community, hope, culture, and all the other positive things that it contributes so those who participate.

Religion is not my cup of tea and my needs are met by my family and friends, but for many others their needs are met in different places including religious institutions.  I don’t like any of the extremes of the atheist or religious; to me that is the war of the Stupidists against the Religulous.

I am presenting these words to you tonight not because I want to make a point, because I think that to make this point is to express uncomfortable things that important people do not want to hear.  I am presenting these words to you tonight because I believe the truth of them needs to be spoken regardless of whether I want to speak them.

We all recently witnessed the horrible aftermath of the Newtown massacre, and the horrible effect that the destruction of young lives had not just on the lives themselves, not just on the lives of their families and friends, but on the whole nation and the world.  In response to that event I wrote a small piece about how I thought leaders should respond to the challenges that lay ahead, and I understand that that piece even made its way to some involved in the healing of Newtown.  But what amazed me more was the feedback that I got via email and comments; my summary of which is that America seems to be able to weigh in the balance the life of its own children and find them worth more than the life of those who it kills with impunity in other countries by drone.

Any review of the facts, when you look for them, is staggering in its brutality.  Scores of children killed in single strikes, hundreds killed across many strikes.  How, I was asked, can America with a straight conscience wail at the death of innocents while it hails death upon innocents?

Surely any reasonable person must pause and ask themselves this question – how can any government that exists to serve its people, serve its people by doing such things in their name?  It cannot be serving its people by killing one enemy only to create a hundred more.  It cannot be serving its people by using cold robots to create white hot rage and fury at the death of children.  And it cannot be serving its people by inuring their own young to death and destruction via remote control.  It just cannot be serving its people.

And surely any reasonable person must pause and ask themselves this question – how can any government of the people being killed serve its people by doing nothing in their name?  It cannot serve its people by turning the other cheek.  It cannot serve its people with steady leadership when they are constantly under threat from the skies.  And it cannot serve its people to create peace if they themselves are radicalised and burning with a hatred for the nation that did this to them.

Government, unless it has become a tyrant detached from the will of its people, must serve the will of its people.  Surely we must not, we cannot, conclude that the government is doing the will of the majority of its people?  No!  But if it is not doing our will are we then to say that we are living under tyranny?  No!  We must not, we cannot accept these things.  We must accept that the reason our governments do these things is because they are misguided and we are not stopping them.  It is our fault; we are all complicit in our silence.

No one wants to be the proud nail that sticks up its head; that’s the head that gets hit with the hammer.  No one wants to be the voice that speaks out against an obvious wrong when we are in the midst of a war; that is unpatriotic.  And no one wants to be seen to be a trouble maker when the world is already full of trouble.

No child’s life, no humans life, should ever be weighed in the balance and found to be worth more than the other.  To do so fails any test of objectivity, morality, righteousness and consciousness.

And no government should act without the authority of its people.  To do so means that the government will either fail or start down the path of tyranny.

But we must act, we should act, and we can act.

Be a patriot – speak up.

And for those in countries such as mine who are friends and allies – speak up.  Our governments too should change and be a true friend and speak up.  Surely that’s what we want our governments to do.

Speak Up.

“There comes a time when silence is betrayal”.
Martin Luther King Jr.

Another year marker has passed and a new one is set before us.

But what do these markers mean?

The pessimist may say that it means time is running down, nothing ever changes, and there’s another hard year ahead.

The optimist may say that it means we are a year older and wiser, we can stop and change, and the year ahead is whatever you make of it.

But I say that time is meaningless and its markers equally so.  If we are present in the moment, then the moment behind us is gone and the moment in front of us may never come.  The moment that matters is the moment we are in.

And so I wish you a lifetime of meaningful moments; New Years has just reminded me that I should wish this for everyone every day.

All the best for 2013!